Five by Five
by Dwimordene
Summary: We don't need another hero...  I love you Tina Turner, please don't sue!  Somewhat less tiny AU the fifth to Dark of the Moon.
1. Revenant

**Revenant**

Pantarax never forgot a face.

Not because they were all so memorable or beloved—it was just business. And Pantarax's business was not the sort in which one could afford a slip. Ever.

Her face had been the last Pantarax could recall seeing before the world had narrowed to a pinprick, to the pavement that Pantarax had—painfully, agonizingly—crawled over, seeking cover in a hostile world.

Later, in the dark of an abandoned gas station, Pantarax had hidden, while a body made to be supple as hardware could be, had fought to heal. And all that long and weary time, her face had remained firmly in mind—like a beacon, guiding a wounded warrior home. For Pantarax had never failed a mission, and would not fail in this one.

So despite the pain of an imperfect healing, Pantarax had gone on the hunt again. Finding her had been simple enough, and Pantarax had spent some time observing her—observing the way she walked, the tilt of her head that let her hair fall across her face; the way she smiled—the slow, shallow one, and the quick flashing one—and the way she frowned, until all of it was intimately known.

Until her every move had teeked cool and soft across ready sensors, and Pantarax could feel _her_ moving in metal and wire and plastic that had submitted to the rhythm of a foreign body, had taken it on as a second skin, and the sound of _her_ voice when she laughed or was angry, upset came without thought.

As wetware went, she had her charms, Pantarax admitted. And if she was unschooled in war, she had already demonstrated that she had learned its most basic lessons well: never hesitate to strike, and strike with everything you had.

Still, the kill had been easy enough, once the time came. She _was_ unschooled, after all. But not until Witwicky had been staring gape-mouthed at "Mikaela" telling him she was leaving him, had Pantarax felt truly well again.

It'd been easy, afterwards, to find another form to please Witwicky. Pantarax had done it once already, after all, and "Alice's" contacts had been glad to welcome "her" back under "her" new name.

For this time... this time there would be no missteps, as Pantarax led Witwicky right down the line, took what was needed in data, and delivered him in good time to the arms of the only justice genocide deserved...

* * *

><p>AN: Mikaela, you deserved a better exit from a crappy last installment in this franchise. I'm sorry this is the best I could do on short notice. I'm sorrier that your actress didn't take a bigger, more profiteering racist down with her when she went...

I ordinarily would not touch anything from RoF with a ten-foot pole, because there's just nothing I feel I can do with it, but desperate times, etc.


	2. Eyeballing It

**Eyeballing It**

Flight was true freedom. Starscream had known many 'bots who had changed forms over the course of the war—because they'd been so badly injured it was safer, quicker, better to just transfer the spark in a new body and wait through the inevitable awkwardness until the person relearned how to move. Or because they had seen a gap they wanted to fill and were tough enough, smart enough to deserve the chance.

He, though, had never been tempted. He would never trade his wings and rockets—he'd been shot down a hundred times, mangled every limb and brace he had, but he'd rather have died than be transferred to a different form. Everyone knew that.

Because he was _not _surrendering the rush that was flying—the feel of the air so swift over his sleek foils it burned even his tough hide as it passed. The unbelievable lightness of his frame as the world tilted below him. He knew how to _move _in the air, and he didn't care who knew it. And it didn't need to be air. Spaceflight had its own joys, as the particle currents slammed into one and lit up the whole dark in a single incandescent instant that left one reeling but alive, alive, _alive_... The only thing comparable to _that _was the clash of a mid-air fight, of flying belly to belly with the opposition, shifting and clawing and falling, only to catch oneself in a burst of fire and heat, part, and come back to savage each other again.

Yes, flight was freedom—but not the cold, senseless freedom that some sought. No. Closed in his alt-mode, every sensor was awake to the faintest changes in the air around him, and when he dove down to hug the earth, he could feel it—feel it passing beneath him, as radar bounce and heat and mag-levels shifted and swelled. Sweet, sensuous freedom. Only flyers could love the earth like that.

But loving the earth did not mean he loved fighting ground-bound. Nothing good ever came of it. So when the first pain erupted in his face, Starscream had recoiled, impulse taking over as he'd sought to find height, find air. His insect-enemies had followed, and he'd heard one calling, then:

_"Aim for their eyes!"_

And it was then that it struck him, and despite the pain, he _laughed. _Take out their eyes? Their _eyes_, as if to see were so very much! Insect-eyes had insect minds—their eyes! He spared a moment to admire Prime's team, that had apparently failed to inform that one never bothered with the eyes for their own sake. For he could feel their heat and movement—fainter than he'd like, wetware was notoriously hard to detect, but low-speed, up close—no problem.

With a hiss and a snarl, he swatted one aside, strafed the others, and a toss of his head sent the two dangling like fools off their little harpoon smashing into a building, as he balanced, perched on the edge of a roof and waited... waited...

Nothing. Job done. It hurt like sunfire, but Starscream pulled that toy pinprick out and tossed it aside, then jet jumped up, transformed, and lit his engines off. Sensors opened to the beautiful chaos of a dying city's intricate airways, and he was _free_...

* * *

><p>AN: So yeah, watched _Dark of the Moon_, and as the battle scenes unfolded, my chorus of 'bots was going, "Um, that ain't the way _I _remember fighting this war. What is it with you and the anthropomorphic assumptions?"


	3. Einstein

**Einstein**

The first sign Will had that anything was wrong—well, more wrong, was a sudden heat and feeling of weight. It was as if the air had just gotten unbelievably heavy, like the worst Mississippi summer swamp fox training day he had ever endured. It was so bad, it sent him to his knees, gasping, and then knocked him sideways, flattening him beneath that invisible weight to the tune of an incredible, glass and steel crescendo.

_I'm dead,_ was his first thought, as the shattered glass and stone began to rain down. Some part of his mind found time to wonder what he'd been hit with, what sort of weapon this was. Then he noticed it wasn't just him: all his squad was down. And by all, he meant _all_: Autobots, too, were on their knees and folding down on themselves, parts shifting about chaotically, as if they were literally falling apart.

There was blood in his eyes, and vision was blurring painfully, but Will managed to crane his neck, to look a little farther up the street, and it was then he realized something had gone insanely wrong, because that was _Starscream _streaking across the sky, going down like a ton of bricks. Megatron was on the ground, looking like some child's broken, twisted plaything, but he managed to flop to one side, and with an inhuman shriek, fire off a shot at Sentinel, who was likewise in no position to dodge.

The pressure that seemed to be bearing down on his skull hit a high point, as eardrums ruptured of a sudden, deafening him. Will groaned—or tried to. He couldn't catch his breath, couldn't draw a breath: all his air hissed out in an ever more shrill whimper of agony as ribs buckled as if hit by a wrecking ball, and vision went red-dark...

… except for the glowing vision of a huge, metallic surface taking up the whole sky, as if the best laser-light shows in the world had gone off at the same time, and the _goddamned buildings were crumpling like tin cans under the light as everything went up in flames—_

* * *

><p>AN: Okay, robot-Einstein. Let's review physics: bodies attract. Large, planetary bodies _really _attract. Given that Cybertron is moving _toward _Earth, it wouldn't just sit there prettily in the sky. Gravity induces movement. I imagine the effect would be a shockwave through Earth's atmosphere as a planet many times larger than Earth and eventually denser came rushing toward it, sucked in by the forces of gravity and inertia (bodies in motion...), and a drastic increase in temperature as atmospheres began to interact, resulting in atmospheric ignition and a lethal crushing force exerted on the surface of Earth.

I may be wrong about the specifics, here. I'm not a physicist. I'm pretty sure Will wouldn't have anything like the amount of time I gave him to die in, while making helpful observations. But I know enough to know that importing a huge planetary body into proximity of another planetary body, such that the invader planet takes up the whole sky and is literally right in the upper strata of the atmosphere—is not a good idea. Einstein tells me so. That isn't an orbit, that's a recipe for collision if one or the other bodies is moving _at all._

(Also, I'm sure in this version that Sentinel was slightly nuts, and Megatron didn't think he was going to do _this_. He probably thought he'd open a stable wormhole big enough to bring the whole fleet through, not the planet.)


	4. Panentheist

"We were gods, once."

Optimus Prime had had more years than he cared to remember to learn _not _to give a hint of reaction—not to let anything of feeling show that sensors could teek, that the eye could see.

Let the enemy know what you thought, give him anything to latch onto, and his claws would be past your armor and digging in your mainlines before you knew it. Control—that was the vital thing one learned in the course of keeping the Autobots alive and fighting.

So he did not react outwardly, and kept the dismay shuttered tightly within, masked it by standing up so that the audible clenching he couldn't prevent didn't stand out.

_We were gods once. _Visions of a destroyed landscape, of shattered docks and fire one could see from orbit swam past the mind's eye, and thought raced even as he said something (anything) placating. He had hoped that the wounds Sentinel had sustained, that his closeness to death might have purged those ideas and left him once again what he should always have been—one of Cybertron's guardians, made to serve.

But deity was a dangerous enterprise, and there were, after all, gods and gods.

By some accounts, Optimus was a deicide, but he could live with that. The question was whether Cybertronians could again afford to live with the gods he had been willing to kill once.

Or if indeed they were alive again, in Sentinel. Should he have tested him differently—foregone the trappings of the old reverence and simply let Sentinel react to the example of one who did not bow, unless to help? Had he misjudged, and played into that horrifying fantasy that had ripped the old religion free of its moorings and helped feed the fires of Cybertron's destruction, as Primes and the ambitious vied for Primacy—for deification? Did Sentinel mean to say he wished to resume that status? Did he mean to say he regretted the adulation lost in the holocaust that had been Cybertron's civil war?

Or did he mean only that he regretted the responsibility and the task that once had been his to share with the other Primes? What _did _he mean?

But Sentinel said no more, seeming only a weary traveler, worn out and lost here. And so Optimus decided to wait, to bide his time.

_Ironhide,_ he sent, however, _keep close to Sentinel—I want you on him at all times. _

_What's wrong? _his weapons' specialist demanded instantly.

_Perhaps nothing. We'll see. But keep Sentinel safe—and listen to him. You know what to watch for._

There was a slight pause, and Optimus could imagine the gravity and darkness in Ironhide's tones in the words that scrolled down the side of his HUD.

_Affirmative. Primus help us!_

_Or pass us by,_ Optimus could not forebear to add. _We are too small for such attentions!_

* * *

><p><em>Time reveals the truth of all things<em>, was an old Cybertronian saying.

And indeed, sometimes truth came in short order. He got one garbled, incomplete message from Ironhide, and then his signal had simply dropped from the HUD, and no amount of searching the team tac net could recover it.

And so Prime knew, then, what Sentinel had meant. And that was why he had foregone mourning to go on the hunt. That was why, when he had traced him to the Lincoln Memorial, and had burned into his memory the image of Megatron and Sentinel together, he did not announce himself. He simply waited, watching Megatron, whom he knew so well after all their time warring, pause from time to time, as if brought up short by something jarring—as if he, too, heard something in Sentinel he did not like. Well—Megatron had never been a proponent of the religion some had made of the old ways. He had always been entirely too free for such things, unless to use them when he had to.

As for Optimus—let others call him 'deicide', if they would. For himself, he endured and kept his faith on the trust that if god were, then god was in all beings, and would survive the death of one twisted incarnation.

And so he waited until Sentinel crossed his sights, until the 'bot was dead in his cross-hairs, back fully toward him, totally exposed—

—and pulled the trigger.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Notes<strong>: Thou shalt not participate in megalomania. Shouldst thou do so, thou shalt rectify this situation pronto, or thy name be not Optimus Prime.


	5. Beyond the Thunderdome

**Beyond the Thunderdome**

**Note: **This Mikaela admittedly relies on how I've developed her elsewhere, even if no specific incidents are referenced. She may still make sense if you liked her in the 2007 movie, but I can't be certain of that. I hope that she does, but apologize in advance to readers if she doesn't. Call this "exorcist fic"...

I'm also fussing with the timeline just a bit, because medals are just too good not to mention, and fudging geography—although on some level I know the Lincoln Memorial does not put us in New York City, I keep thinking Sam is living there for the first part of the movie. At a certain point, I thought, "Why not? This is pre-movie, after all..."

* * *

><p>Mikaela was thoroughly sick of regrets. She was twenty-one, and she was tired of them. She'd <em>been <em>tired of them since before she'd climbed into Sam's car and into more trouble than she'd ever imagined possible. More trouble, even, than reality itself had seemed likely to furnish, and she ought to know: her mom's death, her dad's felony record, her own (purged) juvenile record from when the law had swept her up along with her father when life had all come apart.

She had always known she had a tendency to aim low in the romance department—it had always seemed like less trouble, in a way. Of course, that also meant she'd had to put up with Trent and all his ilk, and the inevitable moment of pig-headed sexism that was just the one insult too much to be borne, but she'd also known that she was unlikely to run out of Trents. That was the real tragedy of it—that she'd been in no danger of loss, no matter how many Trents she went through.

But she'd thought that with Sam, it was different—that this time, she'd kicked the habit of dating musclebound losers. And okay, in all honesty, she'd thought that _after_ Mission City. Before then, well—he'd been the glib geeky guy, trying desperately to impress, and interested in mostly one thing. And she'd been all right with that—hell, she'd been all right with Trent, after all, and every jerk she'd ever dated before him. At some point (namely, the beginning), she'd been willing to go out with them, to be seen with them, to go home with them and screw their brains out since that was something they could both agree was a good time; and at a certain point (namely, the end), she'd been downright _happy _to break up with them.

Not with Sam though—with Sam, breaking up had hurt. It had hurt _badly. _For in between sliding into what she'd assumed was his car that afternoon, and the first time she'd kissed him, had been a planetary crisis that had changed them both: it had made her more than she'd been when she'd accepted that ride. And it had certainly made Sam into more than he'd seemed when he'd first made his offer to ride _her_ home.

He'd been the first boy she'd met who'd been interesting, really, and certainly the first she'd met who, when pressed to it, had given enough of a damn about fairness to change his mind about her—about her dad, about her past... about what she was worth, beyond the way she looked. He'd risked his life to save the world, and gotten treated like dirt for it by the government, even if it had managed to buy off lawsuits and exposés, and the like.

Mikaela understood that, and she understood, too, the burning need _somehow _to fight back, to at least make somebody pay for trying to buy them off and deny access to the Autobots, who were their friends as well as, obviously, allies. Even alien robots couldn't withstand the power of a paranoid bureaucracy.

"That's life," her dad had said, and shrugged philosophically, when she'd complained to him after Tranquility Base had shut down. But he'd also given her a hug, and handed her an airbrush. And so she'd kept herself busy learning more about mechanics around the shop and exchanging furtive e-mails and phone calls with Ratchet, and had kept her spirits up with a little detailing at day's end. She'd thought that, during summers, she and Sam could share that, at least, and work on what to do next, how to be ready—how to do something about the piece of crap junker Sam had bought after 'Bee had been recalled and subsequently kept busy anywhere but near Tranquility, according to 'Bee's own report, though he'd not said where he was or what he was doing.

That meant government work, at least. Mikaela didn't know whether it meant Decepticons—she hoped someone would tell her or Sam if there were something like that going on, but she couldn't be sure anyone would. Even 'Bee and Ratchet might not, if they thought their cohort were handling things.

It was frustrating. To be cut off like this, to get a handshake from the President, and be told to go about your life as if nothing had ever happened, as if it you were a problem for insisting that life could not go on in the same way—it was frustrating. But it was a familiar pattern—after her dad had gone to jail, and it had been up to her grandmother to pay the mortgage on her parents' small house, things had been tight. Really tight. And every agency they'd called, every social program, public or private, that they'd had to plead their case to, had treated them with vague sympathy before rejecting them, or else as if they should feel lucky to get even the pittance tossed them to help with bills.

So it wasn't that she didn't understand how Sam felt, when all he had was a medal and an empty bank account because he couldn't get a reference from the people who gave medals. She knew exactly how much it burned inside to have to listen to canned politeness from some peon who, despite having no particular merits and knowing nothing about you, got to file your resume in the circular bin.

She got it—she understood that. And so she'd had no qualms packing her bags to move cross country and into an apartment with Sam during his last year at college.

But what she hadn't understood, what she still_ could not _understand, was the way he had gone from railing against the system, to railing against the fact that their apartment wasn't bigger, that all they had was stuff they'd brought with them from high school (or in his case, college), that nothing they owned was good enough. He'd even rail against the neighbors.

"Listen to that! What is that, a buzzsaw?" he'd demand, when the elderly, asthmatic Mr. Herrera's snoring rattled in their window, which of course had to be open on a summer's night because they couldn't afford the AC bill. And while that was funny enough, what followed had not been: "What is it with him, anyway? He was just at the clinic all yesterday—should've told the doctors to prescribe him some nose-plugs!"

More and more often, complaints had gone that way, and in that particular tone that just _grated _on her: Sam would complain about something, and while in itself that might've been reasonable, mostly harmless, and even funny, the rant had never stopped before somehow, it wasn't about the system anymore. The world was unfair, but Sam seemed to find that to be the fault of whatever or whoever bothered him, like the neighborhood itself, as if the South Bronx and everything and everyone in it had been the source of all woes—as if it were a personal insult to him, as if he had saved the world himself and because of that, now the world (or rather, their part of it) wasn't good enough for him.

Now, Mikaela didn't have many illusions about their current home: the neighborhood wasn't great. She didn't like the area either, but she lived there, and she didn't think she was too good for it. If the trash wasn't collected, that wasn't to snub her because of anything she'd ever accomplished in particular. And if Mr. Herrera had to go to county clinic _all day _to try to get his meds, well—that wasn't his fault. And it wasn't his fault he snored, either. He certainly didn't try to keep them awake all night.

She'd thought for a long while that if Sam could find a job, things would get better. Some money was better than no money, after all, and _she_ was working and _she _didn't have his problem, even though she wasn't working a garage. She just couldn't find one that wasn't going under, wasn't shady, or that would take her seriously out here. Not yet, anyway, which was why she was filing papers for a temp office, instead, and applying to anything from gas station attendant to junkyard operator.

But a job hadn't helped: every low-paying, scut-work job Sam had landed had been nothing but fuel to frustration. And the litany of complaint had been worst whenever he had turned his eye to her own situation.

"Look at you!" he'd say. "You're smart, you're trained—you're pushing paper for twelve dollars an hour for some agency that doesn't give a crap about that, or about everything you've done." Which was true, and Mikaela knew it, but she didn't like how the tirade ended up being about how her job wasn't good enough for somebody who'd helped save humanity. He didn't always say that in so many words, but she'd learned to feel it—to hear it in his voice, in the way he just dismissed what she did on the way to a lament about his own case.

She'd hated those rants, but they were not even the saddest of them.

"I just want to be somebody again," Sam would say sometimes, when he'd gotten off the worst of the rant. "I've seen too much, Mikki—we saw behind the curtain, and I can't go back to just going through life, like I was before."

"You won't," she'd told him, and had meant to say that he couldn't—that the old Sam, who'd done a fabulous Freudian slip of a pick up line, wouldn't be out here in New York, trying to find some way to make good on that glimpse of the universe behind the curtain. The old Sam had been left behind in the ashes of Mission City.

Sort of, anyway. Because the old Sam hadn't gone entirely away—he was still, she had learned, the boy with two parents who adored him, who came from the big house on the other side of town, where people could live in bubbles. And that boy hadn't figured out yet that this—_all_ this, the cramped quarters, the New York roaches, the barely-paid bills, the dull work and unemployment check lines—wasn't really about _him_. There were a hundred million people and more who had the same problems, and it wasn't about them, either. And even though she hated the temp agency, even though she wanted to get her hands dirty and down into a broken engine, to do what she'd been trained to do _and more _so badly that it hurt, the fact that she couldn't right now—wasn't _about her_.

What _did _concern her, what she _was about_, was getting the job done: was keeping their lights on, and themselves fed, and maybe saving a little time and money to work on Sam's beat-up car. Above all, she was trying to figure out, just in case they couldn't get back to life as it had been for a time in Tranquility, after Mission City, _what they were going to do to be ready. _Because Mikaela had never believed the 'Cons were gone for good—no one had, and that was _why _Sam was so desperate in the end.

She'd tried to tell him that. For the first time ever, she hadn't been arguing with a boyfriend about his wanting to keep her in a cage, or on his arm (which was no different from a leash), or about trying to decide what was best for her or who she was. But she couldn't seem to get through to him.

And she was fed up, finally, of having her job and everything she did—her life in this place, with him—being held up for derision, as unworthy of them. As if the universe owed them things because they'd helped a piece of it. She didn't understand that. Weren't they here, together, trying to find their way? Wasn't that good enough? More importantly, wasn't that the only thing they could do?

And since when, a part of her had demanded, had they had to move with the jet set to deal with Decepticons? They hadn't had anything the first time the Decepticons had come to town, other than a power-saw that had happened to be lying around! Everything they'd done after that that might've been worth something, they'd done with no more training than what high school and her dad's only semi-legal education in hotwiring had provided them. It would take more than that to _win the war, _true, but she'd seen what had happened in Mission City, and so she knew very well: they could have all the best equipment and contacts and six figure salaries, and they—and _everyone on Earth with them_—could still lose the war to the 'Cons when it came right down to it.

That didn't mean, though, that all they were doing was worthless if they didn't have all those things, did it?

If Sam had cared less about the war Earth had found itself suddenly embroiled in, it would have been easier to leave him. The fact that he cared so damned much that it brought out a contempt he'd not outgrown, which had turned him nasty toward everybody else—that made leaving hurt like hell, because it felt like a job unfinished. It felt like failure, that she hadn't been able to _make him see _that she didn't need a hero or want one, if that meant everything depended on them, or if it meant being the sort of person who could call the universe to account and dismiss it when it didn't meet expectations.

And so when she'd left, the first thing she'd dropped into the garbage on her way out had been her own presidential medal of valor. Stupid thing! Stupid, worthless, _fragging _piece of trash that made everything else seem so dull around it Sam had gone fucking blind from the glare!

Mikaela was tired of regrets, but she couldn't seem to shake them, and especially not this one. She'd always been able to leave the boys when they took that one step too far, but this was the first time she'd ever felt bad doing it. Because in the end, it wasn't the same thing with Sam: she'd never really loved Trent, or any of the others. Wanted them—absolutely. Loved them—not at all. She'd loved Sam, though, and the horrible, painful thing of it was that she still did.

But she couldn't live with him, not when he looked down on what they had had, and took everybody who hadn't made it in the world as somehow a punishment he had to suffer.

And so as she shouldered her bag, she fished her phone out and dialed a number, waiting until a woman's voice, with its distinctive drawl, answered:

"Maggie Madsen."

"Maggie—hey, it's Mikaela. Listen," she said, tersely, "I need a favor."

There was a pause, then: "That's great, actually, because I've got a favor in hand."

Which was completely unexpected. "You do?"

"Yeah. I know I told you and Sam last month that I couldn't find anything at the Pentagon for you, with your backgrounds, but I just got a lead from a friend, Jerry, who works in HR for H. Gould—it's multinational financing and a big defense contractor, but their CEO also runs a first-class automobile collection and restoration program, and they need a mechanic. I already gave Jerry your resume. I was going to call you about it."

For a moment, Mikaela stood stock still, tasting the bitterness of irony, that such a favor should fall into her lap now, before irony mutated into the unhappy realization that even if she could unsay farewell, her having this job probably wouldn't satisfy Sam. Until he had his place in the sun, he would never be satisfied, and once he had it... well, then, the world was right again, wasn't it? Even if it was still wrong for everyone else on their block...

"Mikaela?" Maggie's voice recalled her to reality, and she blinked back her tears, wiping them on the back of her sleeve before she said, in as near a normal tone as she could, and hoped pain would sound like relief:

"That's—great. That's, um, that's really great—thanks, Maggie. You got a phone number for this job?"

"I've got it all written out. Listen, I know it's short notice, but can you come down to L-3 Holdings in the city after I get off work? I could meet you then, and give you all the details."

Mikaela took one more look back up at what had been her apartment window, which was glowing in the darkening sky, and let out a silent breath, then said:

"Yeah, sure—in fact, I'm leaving right now..."

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note: <strong>Okay, it's sort of a do-over, I realize that. I wasn't satisfied with "Revenant," though, since I hate the notion that killing Mikaela is a better fate for one of the few decent female characters to come out of American action movies than what the script-writers gave her.

But I also wanted to see whether I couldn't make Bay's easy, dismissive, convenient write-out of Mikaela into an adult, responsible act that would take on an issue that really bothers me about the way Sam's character was allowed to develop (to say nothing of the literal Army of One, a.k.a, Optimus Prime, for whom the greatest betrayal, apparently, in a genocidal war is the highly individualistic crime of betraying oneself. Never mind the nearly extinct population of Cybertronians who are the byproduct of such betrayals...).

Thanks to femme4jack for an e-conversation that gave me the ending of this vignette. All flaws are of course my own.

The title of course comes from the Mad Max series and Tina Turner's song (no infringement intended). "My place in the sun": "That is my place in the sun. There is the beginning and image of the usurpation of all the earth" – Pascal's _Pensées_.


End file.
